Trivia Night at the Tavern

Even if you don't start your campaign in a tavern, and you should, eventually your party is probably going to end up in one. Rolling up to the crossroads, or wandering into a new town, the tavern is a great place for the player characters to enjoy a hot meal and take a long rest. It's also the heart of most communities: think about the words common room or pub, short for public house. This is one place where people are sure to gather: to share a drink... and information. Rumors, clues, job boards, quest leads, important NPCs, we can find all of these things down at the tavern.

Here's one idea to make your party's next visit to a tavern a little more interesting: trivia night! It could be a lot of fun, and there's a ton of potential to stack functions: 1) It's essentially a minigame inside the game, and who doesn't love a minigame? Especially one that's relevant to the greater story here. Because 2) it's a great way to do a lore dump without the players feeling like their getting dumped on, especially if we 3) treat it as a skill challenge and give the players an opportunity to roll ability checks that often go underused. That keeps it gamified and rewards PCs for investing proficiency in a diversity of skills. 4) You could alternatively use it to reward players for paying attention and taking notes. If your players often don't know what's going on, try giving them loot or inspiration for passing a pop quiz occasionally and see how they respond to that incentive. 5) We can still do all the other classic tavern stuff in the midst of this, maybe even more easily: introduce some non player characters, impart information about the surrounding environs, and the local concerns adventurers might address for them.

I'm going to be honest: this is something I haven't actually done at my table before, and it might be a little while before I get a chance to try it. But I had this idea when I mention Trivia in a previous video, and got really excited about it so I really wanted to make this one, instead of the dozen other things on my list. So, yeah, not play tested, but it feels pretty low stakes so I don't think that's really a concern. And with all the usual caveats that every table is different, let's dive in:

Minigames can be a great addition to almost any game because they offer variety and surprise if done right. I love D&D but sometimes you want to change this up a little bit and play something else. Well, why not do both? Here's an hour or a whole session that's going to feel pretty different, a little Easter egg nested inside of our usual game. Trivia night can be a nice change of pace; a tasty intermezzo to refresh the palette so when a tavern brawl breaks out combat feels exciting again. Maybe you're concerned the players won't enjoy it? That's fine, yours might not, and they can take it or leave it. It's D&D after all. Just because it's trivia night doesn't mean they have to participate, or even pay attention. It can just become set dressing, a piece of local color that makes this place feel different than the last. That would be a shame though because we can accomplish a lot if they engage.

There are a ton of ways to signal to your players what's going on and where the adventure is. You can describe the ivy covered ruin on the hill or have a sign that says “Beware: Owlbears” as the path enters the dark forest. But a way to reinforce these signals, as well as spice things up is to go Jeopardy style and frame it in the form of a question: “What is the name of the wizard who built the old tower up on Cursed Hill. And for a bonus point: what foul abomination do the stories say they summoned there?” or “Old Bloodbeak, the scourge of Dark Feather Forest and our village's unofficial mascot, is what type of monstrosity?” I bet there's something you want to introduce in your campaign and this could be a fun way to deliver it. What rumors or plot hooks could you lay in front of your players like this? You can even reverse the process: generate more rumors and plot hooks to make your world richer because you need a few more questions for trivia night at the tavern.

Alright, so if we've got questions, how do we get answers? Well, I see a couple ways to do this, and the first is a skill challenge. Skill challenges are great because it gives the players a chance to use parts of their character sheet that often get ignored, and encourages them to think creatively. This can also be a great way to introduce the dice rolling mechanics of the game to new players so they can get the hang of things before something is actively trying to kill them. I've actually got a different idea for an introductory skill challenge, I think that's the next DM focused video so subscribe and hit the bell to make sure you don't miss it. For trivia night, I can definitely see a bunch of skills applying, and personally I would even use the skills to construct the questions to a degree. That will make sure we cover a diversity of proficiencies and spread the spotlight around on different PCs, and it can help spark more ideas as well.

So for our abandoned wizard tower question I'd probably be asking for History or Arcana. On the owlbear question say Nature, or maybe Survival. We'll put a question about the local beast threat that's on the random encounter table, wolves, spiders, whatever, and maybe that's Animal Handling or Nature. I'd drop a carrot or two in here as well: the magic item rumored to be buried beneath the tower Arcana/History, or the rare medicinal herb that grows in the woods for Nature/Medicine. I'd like a religion check on the list so we can ask about the holy day celebration that the town is prepping for, or some lost shrine rumored to be nearby. You may disagree with my designations, and that's cool. You can call for whatever check you like, or let the players make a case for what skill they think it should be. I like assigning multiple skills in prep sometimes because it helps me stay flexible at the table, but that's me. In game we can require that once a skill is used successfully we can't apply it again to make sure we spread the love.

Obviously the intelligence based skills will get a lot of love on trivia night, and that's good because at a lot of tables those are the least rolled in the game. We've got some wisdom based skills here too, and we can broaden things to accommodate players who have negative numbers for a lot of these rolls. Investigation, insight, maybe even performance could be brought into play by creative players, maybe to gain advantage on other rolls if nothing else. Remember, the players outnumber the DM and they all have their minds to apply to the problem, we don't need to provide the solutions, only the challenges. Stealth, deception, sleight of hand, even intimidation, I can definitely see ways these could be used to cheat during trivia night, obviously with some associated risks. There's plenty of spells and character abilities I can imagine being applied as well.

Players usually like it when they roll high and the character succeeds at the thing: in this case knowing the answer to a trivia question. But Dungeon Masters love it when Players remember things about the world and story their crafting. So as an alternative to a skill challenge, we can make this a test for the players themselves and run it as an actual trivia game. Obviously, we need to ask questions they potentially know the answers to already, so our ability to drop new knowledge diminishes, but sometimes what we really need is a refresher on things we already know. Asking about events from past sessions can serve as a sort of best of / highlight reel and rekindle the love of the game. And asking about lore and the machinations of the baddies can help the players form some connections they may have missed.

If we're clever I think we can combine these two approaches, have some questions as ability checks and some geared to the actual players. Or maybe the player knowing the answer is an automatic success, but if they don't have it they can make the roll. We we can go deep on this: perhaps this tavern isn't what it seems and instead of having some local bard-in-training commoner asking these questions, imagine a scrying litch, or a mercurial Unseelie noble, or a literal demon quizzing the party about all of the things they've learned, and killed, so far. That would definitely let us up the ante and offer greater rewards and actual risks to trivia night.

Whether this tavern is secretly a portal to another plane of existence it's just the local watering hole, we can stack some more functions onto this concept by including non-player characters. Obviously we'll need someone asking the questions, but we can also have some competition, friendly or otherwise. A table of locals, or fellow travelers, or even a rival adventuring party, can provide the answers the PCs get wrong so we still get the info to the players while introducing some useful NPCs. Maybe there's a wizard in the corner who's crushing it, and she can identify that magic sword the fighters been carrying but is afraid to attune to, plus she's got a quest baby. Maybe some drunk guy with a weird haircut has a loud outburst during the religion question and gets dragged out to the street. Guess what adventurers? We've got a cult in this sleepy little town.

There are a ton of possibilities, and I feel like I'm just scratching the surface here. I'd love to see more ideas in the comments below about different ways to do this: different scenarios, different kinds of questions. Who knows? They may get incorporated into my home game, or someone else's reading this.

Some of these articles become scripts for YouTube videos, others start life as transcriptions. You can view this one here